


He Plays the Quena, She Plays the Harp

by carnography (orphan_account)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 08:37:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3404138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/carnography
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No," he whispered, his palm smoothing over one of the rocks, "I can't leave her."</p><p>(Post-Finale)</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Plays the Quena, She Plays the Harp

He stopped counting the days after she died. It seemed fitting. When she was alive, especially near the end, he thought in hours and minutes and seconds. Days. Weeks. Months. Years. Now, he lived in almanac estimates. He only thought of time when it was absolutely necessary, and it wasn’t necessary often.  
  
Months came and went, summer kissed autumn kissed fall and years went by as his wrinkles deepened and his bones grew weak and it became harder and harder to manage all alone. But, he was alone. Stopping by her cairn every morning to remind himself of what she felt like and what she smelled like and how she sounded when she laughed—when she spoke in that smoky, lilting voice. Her lush, white smile. The light came over the mountain ridge, warmed his skin … and he choked down a sob as he always did when he realized he didn’t remember anymore. Couldn’t hear her, couldn’t feel her, couldn’t smell her …  
  
There were days when he forgot what she looked like, and those were the days thar the dawn was gray.  
  
Today, it was dark. The congested clouds forecasted rain. They looked like bruises against the pale sky. He needed to move quickly, as quickly as he was able these days. Joints creaking, he picked up his gnarled walking stick resting against her smooth stones.  
  
“I’ll be back after noon, Laura,” he rumbled, leaving her cabin and her grave and setting off down the hill toward the river that meandered through the valley. Slowly, slowly. He moved slower every day.  
  
There were days that he had to remind himself of who he was—that he was William Adama. Because when he looked into the water, he could hardly recognize the weary man—the broken man—staring back. He was thin and sore and dark from the unrelenting African sun. He looked like a lovelorn nomad with his uncut hair and unshaven beard. Gray now, all gray now. Old—very old. And feeble. A brittleness settled in his bones and produced a dull ache that never seemed to subside.  
  
Hurling his cast into the gurgling stream, he ignored the spattering of rain on his beaten brow and eased down, waiting on lunch and dinner and breakfast. He wasn’t worried. This world …  
  
“There’s so much life,” he murmured to himself, wiping the back of his trembling hand against his sunburnt lips. Adama glanced skyward, past the canopy of trees; and as hard as he tried, he couldn’t see her in the sparse, shifting light of the sun.  
  
Some time after one, the Old Man labored up his hill-face. Puttering along his beaten trail until the cabin came into rolling view. Relying on his whittled cane, he crept toward home—breath shallow, a line of fish slung over his weak shoulder. An ominous roar of thunder above his head.  
  
He cooked the fish quickly, and went to bed with the soothing drum of rain against the roof. His companion was a rhythmic drip on the floor. Like music, like a lullaby. And he was grateful for it. Sometimes it got too quiet to sleep.  
  
Adama woke in the night.  
  
It was quiet and black; and compelled, he got to his feet and shuffled outdoors. His hand grabbed a hold of a beam supporting the porch, steadying as a cool breeze touched his face. He closed his eyes, resting his forehead against the sanded wood and listened to the distant sound of dancing trees, trees whose leaves moved en masse, like a woman’s hair. When he opened them again, his gaze was arrested by Earth’s gleaming moon. The bright stars that nearly covered the sky.  
  
Stars. Most of them were already gone. And yet, here they were—light unextinguished, still touching so much. Beautiful and existing somewhere between life and death.  
  
“Stunning, aren’t they?” came a voice, foreign and familiar. A voice he had forgotten. An old song played on instruments that no longer existed.’  
  
Standing next to him—nocturnal wind rustling her hair, a beatific smile brushed across her face.  
  
“Hello, William Adama,” she said.  
  
Laura.  
  
He croaked out her name in a shuddering breath, his eyes wide and his knees weak. Adama held onto the post, clutching it as he stared in awe of this ghost. Her stare was sympathetic.  
  
She tilted her head, as if to chastise him. “I’m afraid not,” she apologized, “But don’t worry. You’ll see her soon enough.”  
  
His eyes adjusting to the darkness and to her light, Adama squinted as she drew nearer. She was right—she wasn’t the Laura he knew; she was somehow more beautiful, but much more frightening. Almost jarring in her perfection. An idealization of the mortal woman he buried in the dark soil of paradise. And something told him that she belonged to things he’d never believed in.  
  
“Are you frightened?” the myth asked softly.  
  
His body trembled as he forced his eyes away from her, away from it. “I…don’t…”  
  
She laughed quietly. “Oh ye of little faith.”  
  
“Come on,” his visitor implored, standing in the grass before him. Barefoot. Her pale hand outstretched, inviting him to take it. “You’ve kept her waiting long enough.”  
  
He grit his teeth, a despairing look to his eye. “How long?”  
  
She said nothing until he met her inhuman gaze.  
  
“How long?” Adama ground out, clutching onto the post—his soft nails bending against the wood.  
  
“You’re eighty-three years old. You’ve lived here for quite some time.”  
  
Bill’s eyes drifted shut, weighed down by all this time. He never intended to live for that long. Long ago, he suspected—even anticipated—his death. Disease, starvation, a bad fall. Maybe he’d stumble on the hunting grounds of those wild dogs that roamed the savannah, the ones that bit at the graceful legs of Laura’s antelope. He might infringe on their territory with his unprotected skin and his too-blunt spear…  
  
A few years back, or what he could only suspect was a few years, he decided to reach for the sidearm hidden beneath his bedding. One bullet saved for a time when the hurt of it all overwhelmed him, bogged down his heart, and wouldn’t let up. He lumbered outside when it was dark and sat beside Laura’s stones for a long time, holding that gun in his shaking hands and placing it on his temple. One, two, three times before he snarled at himself and hurled the sidearm down the cliff face. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to end his life early when Laura’s life ended too soon. Bitterly, he cried—his tears salty. And for the second time, he wept that he should have gone first. That it was the natural order of things.  
  
He should have gone first.  
  
He was going now.  
  
Adama took the strange, elegant hand. Her palm was warm and soft, and he felt a sudden vigor to his limbs. His bones no longer ached or creaked. He straightened, and for the first time in a long time, he felt strong and he felt like a man. The visitor smiled warmly and wound her arm in his, pulling him snug against her smaller frame. It was strange. She was strange, something entirely different, made up of atoms and elements undiscovered by man. The heat from her body was something like a solar flare, or the birth of a star, something that arrested all his five senses.  
  
“What are you?” he whispered hoarsely, staring at Laura’s face with the knowledge that this creature wasn’t Laura Roslin. Not the one that he knew. Not the one that he loved.  
  
Her eyes lit up—a bright green—and she smiled again. “I am an angel of God sent here to guide you,” she said very simply. ”To the world beyond this one.”  
  
“Laura said there would be … a boat.”  
  
“All in good time,” she chuckled, beginning to walk.  
  
At first, he didn’t resist. But as they neared the grave, his fingers tightened about her elbow and he stopped. “Wait.”  
  
The angel looked back, her pin-straight hair lifting with a dry gust. He crouched to the ground and touched the stones with his fingers.  
  
“You don’t want to leave her.”  
  
“No,” he whispered, his palm smoothing over one of the rocks. “I can’t leave her.”  
  
“She’s not there,” the angel stated softly. “Her body hasn’t been there since you laid the last stone.”  
  
Bill stared at her—disbelieving, almost furious in his confusion.  
  
“She was done,” the angel said, “And we took her back. Just as we did with Kara Thrace and just as we will do with Gaius Baltar, Caprica Six, and Leoben Conoy when they’re finished.”  
  
All that bullcrap, all of that mystical nonsense that Baltar ranted and raved about. Angels among them. True. And Baltar, that frakking son of a bitch, was one of them. Bill almost chuckled at the idiocy of it all.  
  
“Come on, get up,” she urged him, and he did. The angel slipped her arm through his and ushered him away from the grave, down his path that lead to the river. “Don’t look back,” she warned him, as they moved further and further from the cabin. “Do not look back.”  
  
And despite his atheism, he obeyed.  
  
She didn’t speak any more as they slowly descended, heading toward the distant and shadowy timberline. The moon and the stars gleamed across the long blades of grass and the earth was completely silent. Not a single noise from a single insect.  
  
“Do you have a name?” he asked, for no reason other than to know.  
  
“Among the five of us, it is best not to name names. We have none,” she said, “But I will become known as מִיכָאֵל in good time.”  
  
The noise she made was like nothing he had ever heard, and when he tried to wrap his tongue around the pronunciation—he found he could not speak it. She smiled at his attempt, seemingly amused.  
  
“Does everyone see you when they…?”  
  
“No.” she admitted. “I’ve never been sent for this particular task before.”  
  
“Then why-?”  
  
A broad smile drifted across the angel’s face. “Because He made you for my counterpart. And I wanted to see what became of you. I wanted to deliver you to her.” She paused with a good-natured peal of laughter, “Besides, you atheists deserve a good talking to you before you dismiss the promise of everlasting life as some delusion of a sick and senile mind. As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s quite insulting.” She made a derisive noise and shook her head.  
  
He smiled. “Has she met you?”  
  
“Of course not,” the angel said, as if the idea were preposterous. “It would be redundant. She’s fashioned after me. I already know her and though she’s not aware, she knows me just as well.”  
  
They moved through the veil of trees, a smattering that cloistered the river. As they moved toward the water, the previous silence of the world vanished. The trees burst into song. Birds chirping, nighttime insects playing their legs in an instinctual symphony that engulfed him. Adama felt a sudden rush of excitement and then the long forgotten tug of placidity. A jumble of emotions that all pointed toward happiness. It was like nothing he had ever felt. There was a lightness to him, and a heavy weight lifted from behind his eyes.  
  
The angel led him along the bank.  
  
“To die is your most exquisite gift,” she said gently, eyes forward, “It is where you come closest to unparalleled rapture. Nirvana, as they say. Yet, human beings spend their whole lives fearing it. Cylons, in their quest for resurrection, defiled it. And here, it is only when you die that you become what you were intended from the start.” She paused. “It’s rather tragic, actually. That you fear your own transcendence.”  
  
Bill glanced into the water and saw a young boy this time—a small boy with cow eyes and a cherubic face. Surprised, he looked back to his guide—finding her taller than him, finding his small hand encased in her gentle grasp. She peered at him through the darkness and grinned, stopping so that she could lift him in her arms and carry him.  
  
“You move in circles, in streams, in songs. Your melody never ends because it never starts,” the angel murmured, continuing through the moon-bathed trees.  
  
Bill said nothing, because he found that he knew no words. And he felt himself grow younger and younger, softer and smaller, until he was an infant cradled in the creature’s arms. His fingers reached for her red hair, touching a strand so straight and so smooth that it slipped through his grasping little hands. The water rippled from where she stepped into the river, wading further and further into the dark water. It was calm, and there was nothing in him but joy.  
  
“You are innocent, William Adama,” she whispered, closing his eyes with a touch of her fingertips, “You are innocent and now, you are free.”  
  
She lowered him into the warm water and guided him down, down, down. There was silence in the blackness of the river, and he did not emerge.  
  
He sunk. And for that, he was glad.

***

  
“Mama! Daddy!” a ten-year-old girl darted down the steep hill, her dark hair flying behind her as she waved a stick in the air.  
  
Her father looked up, watching as his daughter ran breathlessly to where he and his wife sat in the plain. Their new son twiddled his mother’s long white hair as he gurgled and cooed and basked in the sun. Ready to sleep.  
  
The girl, gangly thing that she was, almost stumbled as she rushed back to her parents. Making a ruckus.  
  
“What in God’s name are you carrying on about?” her father scolded her, getting to his feet. “I told you not to wander too far.”  
  
The baby fussed.  
  
“Gaius,” Caprica warned.  
  
“I found a house!” the girl exclaimed, “And an old man. He needs your help, daddy. He’s not moving.”  
  
Caprica rose and shared a look with her husband. “Stay here with your brother,” she instructed, carefully handing over the infant to his still-winded sister.  
  
“But Mama!”  
  
“Stay here,” her father said, already heading toward the hill. His wife, sparing a look to her children, trailed after him.  
  
Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six found the Admiral dead in his bed. He was a fragile, bearded man—a sad shadow of the once powerful and daunting figure that Baltar remembered. He had not been dead long; so, both Gaius and Caprica lifted him and carted his corpse outdoors and laid him out carefully in the grass.  
  
Baltar slumped to the ground and watched Adama for quite some time before his stare drifted to what was undoubtedly the gravesite of Laura Roslin. He swallowed a lump in his throat. Caprica breathed and drew his attention to where she stood.  
  
“We should bury him next to her,” she said.  
  
“Yes,” Baltar agreed, nodding his head. “Yes, I think we should.”  
  
There was a rusty shovel in the cabin and Caprica collected stones as Gaius dug into the earth. It was hot and the sun beat down on his brow and when he paused to rest, he looked in the distance and saw five figures watching him. They were faces he knew from his fantasies (that red dress, that pinstripe suit), and faces he knew in his lifetime. A face he expected and two that he did not. One that inclined her head, bidding him to continue.  
  
And he did.  
  
The five stood there until he and Caprica arranged the last stone on Adama’s grave. Then they were gone.  
  


***

  
A bell sounded—rich and golden and full.  
  
Bill opened his eyes.  
  
A cool spray of mist wafted against his face. His hands, clutching the white railing, were big and sturdy—just as he remembered them. The waves pushed against the hull of the ship as it cut through the water and he smiled. His grin was full.  
  
It was dawn, a sky dressed in pastels.  
  
And at the peak of a distant hill there waited a woman—a woman dressed in red. And her smile was more brilliant than the eastern sun.


End file.
